Thanks to all of you who attended ServerlessConf, and contributed to making it such a fun conference. If you missed it, I hope to see you next year and recommend checking out the videos of the talks when they become available.

With only one track and two days, the speaker list for ServerlessConf was fairly short. One side effect of this was that every talk was 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥. That said, these four talks particularly stood out:

Charity Majors's talk "Serverlessness, NoOps, and the Tooth Fairy" covered how important ops is, no matter how serverless your application. Owning your dependencies (even if they're outsourced) is still your problem, and you're in charge of providing a good experience for users.

Patrick Debois' talk about #servicefull, a different angle on DevOps & serverless. Every serverless application takes advantage of SaaS providers, and as a developer you need to think carefully about what each service provides, and where it fits in your system. Patrick examined this through the lens of
Promise Theory, which is a way of modeling interaction between systems that make promises like "as long as you pay me some number of dollars per month, I will authenticate up to 2,000 active users."
Slides here

Dr. Donald Ferguson talked about learning new (serverless) tricks as an experienced developer. He covered his team's path from J2EE to using Java with Lambda and API Gateway, and what they gained compared to the technology they were used to.

The first day's keynote from Tim Wagner announced
Flourish, a new way to model and deploy serverless applications on AWS. The project will be open source (Apache License) and on Github in the next couple of weeks.

Now, just one selfish plug. My talk was about building welcoming open source and including contributors of all stripes. Get the slides at
oss.serverless.zone, and the video will be up along with the rest of the talks in two weeks.

There are two other things I wanted to highlight this week:

The Funcy-Azure project. It's an open-source deploy tool aiming to provide a great experience to devs using Azure Functions.

This excellent four-part series from @johncmckim on migrating a simple Express application to the Serverless framework. Check out part one, part two, part three, and part four on Medium.